


The Latchkey Kids

by Faemonic



Category: Disney Cartoons (Classic), Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Heteronormativity, Isn't It Chromatic?, M/M, Nealfire is dead, Nealfire is still dead, Other, drunk!Regina, neurodivergence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 13:58:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4224336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faemonic/pseuds/Faemonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Henry adjusts to life in Storybrooke after "Kansas".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Return of the Prince

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Henry reflects on the first day of school.

Henry dealt with his false memories easily. Television shows with muppets taught him to read and count. His mom couldn’t afford primary school or day care, and he suspected that she stole cable from the neighbours, but the TV shows gave him everything he needed to prove that he was smart. He started school early—he was maybe almost five years old—and it had been a private school, in the city, and on scholarship because a child psychologist made him do some tests and decided that he was gifted. His mom had to go look for a job that day. He hadn’t wanted to be any trouble, but he cried when she left because he hadn’t ever been left alone with so many strangers before. She should have waited two more years to save up for the cost of even getting him into a public school, and when he thought about it there was no call to go about giving scholarships to grade schoolers even if a kid _could_ read whole sentences silently at age almost-five, but then again…

…this never happened. 

On his first day of school, a little after he had turned six years old, his mother drove him to the schoolhouse and walked him to the classroom. The teacher and his classmates had already been at their desks, but nobody scolded him for coming late. Instead, they all sat in silence, staring straight ahead of wherever they would be looking, until his mother began to speak. After that, there had been lessons in counting and the alphabet. He learned to dance the hokey-pokey for physical education hour. His mother still sat in the corner and watched. Henry wondered if she was trying not to laugh at him whenever he got a step wrong, and then he wished that she would laugh at him. Anything but that coldly cautious silence. 

At noon, his classmates took their lunch boxes to their table and ate there, but his mother took him downstairs to the cafeteria. This was so that they could have a proper lunch with plates and cutlery. When his mother decided that wasn’t proper enough, she drove them to a restaurant. He had wished that she'd let him stay and eat in the classroom, where all the chairs were just his size, but then again, she let Henry choose the restaurant. 

He went back to class late, and his mother didn’t think it was fair that he should miss out on art hour because of that, so the whole class had art hour all over again. Henry was relieved. This, at least, was something that he knew how to do. He had modeling clay to play with back at home. They used a different brand at school, though—one that didn’t taste as good and, as it turned out, was not non-toxic. 

His new classmate Eustace made a snake out of clay, or maybe Eustace just liked to roll clumps of clay into logs. Another classmate named Jill made pancakes out of clay, or maybe Jill just liked to slam her hand against the table over and over until she hurt herself and started crying.

Henry made Regina worried sick. He tried to argue that he was making an apple pie out of clay that was meant to be eaten, and of course he knew that it wasn’t a real pie, but it might have been his argument that not _non-toxic_ didn’t automatically mean _poisonous_ that saved his education. 

Regina allowed him to attend the next day of school—counting, the alphabet, the hokey-pokey that he finally knew all the steps of and called his mother to join in but she wouldn’t, they had lunch out, and art hour again. Eustace made snakes. Jill made pancakes. Henry ignored the clay and went for the building blocks.

“But that’s not art,” Regina told him. 

“Is too,” Henry argued. “It’s artsy-hit-texture.” He remembered the alphabet lessons, and put his knowledge to use when he read the spines of the books on Regina’s shelf. One had been a book about architecture, which he didn’t know how to pronounce. “If you don’t let me play blocks, I’ll eat something I shouldn’t instead.”

Regina let him play blocks.

Several days later, Regina made him a packed lunch and stopped sitting in for his classes. Henry didn’t blame her for not showing up, but he did complain to her when she drove up to take him home at the end of the day. He could recite the alphabet backwards, not because anybody had taught him to but because he was so bored with what they were teaching him. He had applied his knowledge of numbers to the passage of time, to the o’clock of the day and its pieces of minutes, to the passage of years that made a person how old they were…and nobody cared, or maybe nobody understood. Didn’t it make sense? Didn’t it matter? Wasn’t it awesome? No. Henry had stuck in and out and shaken about his extremities, and turned himself around, enough times to question the final declaration of, “That’s what it’s all about!” That’s what the entire educational system wanted him to think, drilled into his head every single day, but every fiber in his being rebelled. There had to be more than doing the hokey-pokey in this world. There just had to be. 

Art hour had been modeling clay, again. Eustace had made snakes. Jill had made pancakes. Henry had refused to make friends.

“I’ll have you promoted to the second grade,” Regina said, firmly, when his rant had ended. 

It hadn’t helped.

Henry preferred those memories, though. It was frustrating, but it was real. His memories before moving to New York City, the ones that had nothing to do with Storybrooke, were like trying to remember a dream if the dream lasted for a decade. He thought it was because the present moment is always more real, but the moment he and his mom drove over the town line kept memories more trustworthy than memories. The Storybrooke memories felt like that, too. 

Letting the fake memories focus in his mind felt like overhearing his moms fight about money—which had never happened, but he could imagine some hint of the depth and complications of adulthood, mysteries that even Henry the boy genius wasn’t ready for, and he felt it. Even a hint was uncomfortable. 

Regina’s magic took Emma’s memories and blended them into Henry’s own mind, in Regina’s own style. Regina wished that she’d sent Henry to school sooner, even though she couldn’t ever have let him go or admit to herself that he was growing up at all, let alone growing up that fast. For Emma, school had been just another pretence of her foster so-called “families” that they ever really cared about her future. She was a frequent truant, needing to reveal the sham that each family was, even when nobody believed her and she only hurt herself. 

The grade school scholarship wasn’t a memory so much as somebody else’s fantasy, somebody else’s regret, branded into some foggy corner of his brain.

Henry, now almost thirteen years old, paused on the suburban sidewalk of Storybrooke town and indulged in an apprehensive shudder. He could have been cursed. He could have lost his mind, he could have lost time, and danced the hokey-pokey every afternoon for twenty-eight years like Eustace and Jill. That hadn’t been what happened, but the false memories were the closest he’d ever gotten to being cursed. 

Even the blessing of fiction was a curse against truth. 

Things were better now, Henry reminded himself as he approached the campus. Everything was better now. Regina let him walk to school. Emma let him pick up stuff on the way back that she needed. Regina had made up with her stepdaughter, put her toxic half-sister behind bars, and started dating again.

Henry could make his own decisions, too. He was going back to school here in Storybrooke.

Archie and Belle had helped him with the enrollment, which was more complicated than when Emma did it for him under the cloud of a contagious memory spell. Without a transcript of records from his year in New York, the headmistress let him take the three requisite tests: the test of strength, the test of wits, and the test of heart. 

The swordfighting practice Henry had with his dad and granddad helped a lot with the test of strength, which was basically whether he could hack a scarecrow into a pile of hay in under fifteen minutes. The test of wits was a regular pencil-and-paper entrance exam, which Henry thought was easy until he got to the Enchanted Forest History & Geography section. Fortunately, it was all multiple choice, and Henry was a good guesser. The test of heart was a stethoscope pressed to his back and chest, under his shirt, in the school clinic.

When Henry emerged from the final test, he caught the headmistress saying to Archie and Belle, “Of course we’re going to let him take the class! He’s the mayor’s son, and Mr. Gold’s grandson, and claim to the throne of at least three kingdoms. We’ve got to find something for him to do, though, or else he’ll start casting magic…” the headmistress trailed off when she saw Henry.

“I’m in, then? That’s great,” Henry said. The nurse had mentioned a theory of the headmistress that students who weren't challenged enough academically might develop uncontrollable telekinesis. “So, tell me about the clubs.”

Membership openings and meetings would be announced at homeroom, but Henry could look forward to the following: several kinds of scouts including “hamlet militia scouts”, ballroom dance, folk dance, contemporary dance, fatal dance survival, choir (celestial), racket (infernal), orchestra, drama club, mixed martial arts excluding weaponry and magic, mixed martial arts including improvised and skilled weaponry but excluding magic, Little League baseball, Major League Calvinball, archery, swimming, equestrians, dragonslayers, otherkin-human alliance, psionics, and the school newspaper which was for some reason planning to publish in Esperanto and Tengwar but not in English.

Henry thanked the headmistress and the three of them left. That had been yesterday. 

Today, Henry decided, “Sea scouts.” The student council had been the first extracurricular on his mind, but even if he didn’t like that the school decided grade-schoolers would be too young for that, he didn’t want to start it from nothing. Maybe nobody in his grade or lower would be interested, anyway.

Or maybe…

He caught sight of some familiar faces: Ava, sitting on the swing like a grown-up instead of actually swinging, was slightly older than a sixth grader should be. Henry was happy to see her in school at all, instead of stealing from convenience stores so that she and her little brother didn’t starve. Her wild and bushy blonde hair had been plaited and tied in a bun. Seated beneath the shade of a tree was Cygnus, who Henry suspected was the son of Sir Percival of King Arthur’s Round Table but the other boy was too snobbish and shy for Henry to want to find out. Grace wore a chain of daisies in her hair and twirled around somewhere off in the corner. Meanwhile, bolting around the playground and shouting with excitement, went the Woolfe quadruplets. They looked nothing alike, but Henry hadn’t bothered to tell them apart because they shouted a lot and roughhoused everybody they ran into. He used to just stay away.

Henry vaulted the gate and landed in the playground, waving an arm in greeting. “Hey, everybody!” He shouted, happily. “I’m back! I’m home—” 

The sentence broke because someone punched him in the stomach.


	2. Imaginary Friends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grace rescues Henry from a schoolyard bully, who might have had sympathetic motivations for punching Henry in the gut and kicking him in the ribs...because this is Once Upon A Time.

Someone punched Henry in the stomach. It’s too pithy a description. A boy rushed towards Henry so fast that his arms and legs blurred, but that dark aquiline face remained clear and steady, full of hatred that the quadruplets never had. That hatred powered a fist like a cannon ball.

“I’m home—” Henry began, but the M turned bile-flavored in his mouth with the impact. Henry crumpled forward, shocked, then so pained that he didn’t notice the grass and bugs in his face. He felt his backpack shift. Someone was pulling its strap, pulling his shoulder, forcing him to face up, and he knew that face now. Henry choked, “Hareesh, wha…what are you…”

Hareesh’s sneakers tensed and started. Henry covered his own face with his arms and cried out at the kick to his ribs.

A girl’s voice cried out, “Stop it!” 

Hareesh replied with a sarcastic challenge, “Or what, you’ll strangle me with your flower bracelets?”

Grace to the rescue! Henry thought, moving his arms down to his pained midsection. He couldn’t breathe. His insides lurched as if he were about to vomit. The world was a spinning wheel spewing friction burns and sharpened spindles. He was going to suffocate in his own vomit, and then die of embarrassment because that cause of death would go on his tombstone. 

“Stop it,” Grace said. “That’s all. He doesn’t know what he’s done wrong! Stop it!”

Her voice rose in panic, Henry realized, because Hareesh was leaning over him. The other boy said, “You tell your family this isn’t a monarchy.”

The playground hadn’t fallen silent through the whole thing, Henry realized. He lay for a little longer in the ground, until fragrant flower petals began falling over his face. When he was sure that he wasn’t going to die but merely continue to live in excruciatingly visceral pain, he spoke. “Grace, are you still there?” Another cascade of flower petals answered him yes. A trifle crossly, Henry asked, “Didn’t anybody else see what just happened?”

“Of course they did,” Grace replied. “But we can’t all be heroes.” Henry wanted to swear that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. Inner city playgrounds were less violent than this, the guardians more attentive, and the consequences more organized and swift. Grace continued, “If you don’t get up and walk by the time the bell rings, maybe someone will call an ambulance.”

Henry sat up, slowly. He didn’t have any bones broken, but the center of his body just hurt like a cramp. “That’s an unpleasant surprise. Someone hates me,” Henry said. His heart sank. “That never happened before the curse broke, either.” 

Without smiling, Grace said to him, “Welcome back.”

Henry lurched to the washroom to rinse the tears from his face and brush off the flowers from his hair. When he got to class, Hareesh was nowhere to be found. Henry didn’t know how to feel about that, and kept wondering about it so that he kept drawing the wrong textbooks out of his bag at the start of each class. In geometry, or maybe it was science class, the teacher noticed that Grace wasn’t wearing any shoes and so sent her home when she refused to remember where she left them.

“Seriously?” Henry blurted. “That’s what you notice? I didn’t know that the Dark Curse rerun brought the brain fog back.” He wanted to shout and shove his desk over, but, he reminded himself, he was technically a prince. The teacher only stared at him, astonished and looking a little afraid, as Henry neatly packed his bag and left the classroom with quiet dignity.

Well, as dignified as he could leave with a limp, because if he walked normally then his right leg would pull at the stitch in his side.

Out in the hall, he called, “Grace, wait up!”

Grace didn’t wait up, but she walked slowly, lining up her heel with the toes of the foot behind her and continuing on as if she walked a tightrope.

When Henry lurched alongside her, he couldn’t help but ask, “What are you doing? You’re weirder than when the curse broke.”

“We are both, so we are neither, so we are nothing, so we are all. But not you.” She said, dreamily, wobbling on her balance.

Henry nodded and said slowly, “Right.” He decided to change the subject. “What really happened to your shoes?” 

“Oh, that.” Grace walked a little more normally. “I lent them to Pete.”

“Pete?” 

“My brother. He has his own shoes, but he borrowed mine to do a locator spell. He only needed one, but I couldn’t go to school with only one shoe, so I told him to take both of them.” 

“You didn’t have any other shoes?”

Grace put a finger to her chin and hummed ponderously. “I might,” she said, “I’ll have to check. Do you want to walk me home? Maybe Pete’s already there and you can meet him. He has a dragon.” Grace said the last word casually, even a little disdainfully, as if she were telling him that her brother had a coffee addiction. 

“A dragon! You live with a dragon? Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go! I mean,” Henry added, calming down before he jumped and jogged off and twisted a bruise, “Sure, yeah, I should text my mom first. What’s your address?”

Grace blinked, surprised. “You already know it.”


	3. Imaginary Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grace makes the Mad Hatter look sane. Pete has a dragon. There might be a reference to Kingdom Hearts.

Henry had attended Grace’s tenth birthday party at her house. It might have been Grace’s twenty-eighth tenth birthday, and it might not have been her house but her parents’ house, and they might not have been her parents.

But he knew the address, all right. 

“You still live here,” Henry said. “I don’t remember seeing your brother at your birthday party.”

“Pete’s _real_!” Grace exclaimed, and pointed at the lawn. “Look, there’s his dragon! The dragon's name is Elliott! Pete is real!”

What looked like a giant monitor lizard lifted its head, the movement defining the green and scaly body in Henry’s eye from the rest of the lawn and garden greenery. Elliott was too small and flat and soft-looking to ride, and Henry knew that this dragon couldn't breathe fire. 

“That’s a Komodo dragon,” Henry said. “I saw another one like it at the zoo. It’s still pretty cool,” Henry added, and he meant it, but some other part of his mind was trying to put the situation together. “Why did Pete need your shoes for a location spell? Wouldn’t he already know where you are?”

“Papa gave me those shoes.”

“I’m sorry,” Henry answered, “I should have guessed.”

Grace loosened a lanyard that she wore around her wrist like a bracelet, until a set of keys fell out with a jangle and several petals fell out with no sound at all. As she unlocked the gate, she asked, “Have you guessed right, though?”

Henry followed her to the porch. “You and Jefferson got separated during the second casting of the dark curse. You went back to your Storybrooke parents. They took you in. Pete’s helping you to find your dad again.”

“Right except for that last part,” Grace said, and she addressed a rocking chair on the porch that was not moving because it was empty. “Right now, Pete’s sitting there and doing nothing. Hi, Pete. This is Henry.”

Henry moved his hand uncertainly in the air between the arms of the rocking chair, between the seat and the backrest. “Is Pete the chair?”

“No.”

“Is Pete invisible?”

“If you can’t see him, I guess he is.”

“And inaudible. And intangible.” Henry let his hand drop. 

“Do you want to come in?” Grace asked.

Henry gave a suspicious pause. He’d read enough fairy tales to know that nobody actually talked about romantic love. That was the narrator’s job, not the characters’, even if it would make life so much easier if everybody could just spit it out. Add to that, he’d been teased at school in New York for making friends with girls. His once-and-for-all declaration that it wasn't like that with any of them had gotten Kairi to keep her distance because she wouldn’t even have considered it being “like that” enough to declare anything…and got another girl also named Grace to lock herself up in the bathroom stall and cry, because her friendliness had actually been flirting and he didn’t know. So, he’d stayed friends with Avery, who was gay and knew how annoying it was for everybody to make such a big deal about something so personal, and so they had sleepovers where absolutely nothing in that direction ever happened. Eventually he learned to ignore the teasing, and Kairi and the other girls became his friends again sometimes, and everybody just decided that Henry was normal and boring. Some of the grown-ups mistook that for being popular.

Sometimes Henry wondered if people would make life just slightly easier for him, if he would just get Interested in somebody already, but he couldn’t help it if he wasn’t. And he wasn’t. 

He hoped Grace wasn’t, either, but with Graces you could never be too sure.

She added, “There might still be some hot cocoa from this morning.” 

“Cinnamon?”

“That’s kind of weird, Henry.”

He sighed with relief. This Grace wasn’t Interested. At least, nothing had changed between them in two years. 

But, as he went into her house, he wondered at how much had changed between curses. There sun was still too high up for any light to come in through the windows, but when he tried the light switch, none of the electric lights went on. The switch was dusty. He stifled a sneeze. 

“That’s been broken since the second curse! Let’s take this out on the porch instead.” Grace emerged from the kitchen with two cups of cocoa. “Thanks for threatening the bus driver so we could ride home, by the way.” Otherwise she would have walked home barefoot on the sun-baked pavement. There had to be something wrong with the school for expecting her to do that, Henry thought.

“I didn’t threaten,” Henry said, “I asked.” He opened the front door for her and followed Grace to the porch. 

“Your mother could make a human body spontaneously combust if anybody told you no. It’s a favor in your head, but it’s a threat as soon as it’s out of your mouth. I’m sure Hareesh is already dead.” She said the last sentence casually, as if she were telling Henry that she were sure that the weather would be better tomorrow.

Henry rubbed at the bruises on his ribs. “That’s not the way to do things,” he decided. “I’ve got to find out why Hareesh hates me.”

“If he quits beating you up, does it matter? Spontaneous combustion—”

“No!” 

“Suspension, expulsion—he made that kinda self-imposed today…”

Henry shook his head no. 

Grace tilted her head. “Imprisonment. He isn’t good for society. He’ll be tried as a juvenile and have the court records sealed by the time he’s grown up and acts like a goddamn grown-up…That’s what Pete says.”

“Nope, I’ve got to find out why he hates me.”

“You’re crazy. That’s all right.” Grace took a sip of cocoa. “My dad’s crazy, and he’s still a good person.”

“If we have a problem, we should use our words. That’s kindergarten stuff,” Henry said. 

“Yeah. Kindergarten stuff! Time for more serious measures!”

“No, no, no, no, no—Grace, no!” Henry said, “I meant that the first thing we learn about what’s right and wrong is sometimes the most important thing to keep up!” But it gets complicated, he realized, if you Use Your Words to ask for an innocent favor and it turns out to be the same as holding a gun to someone’s head.

“He didn’t seem to be in a talking mood,” Grace observed. “If he waited this long to punch you out, he might never be. But good luck!”

“What time do your parents get back home?”

“Not until after I’m asleep. They’re both working. I think they leave for work before I wake up. If you need to go home, you can go ahead. Pete’s with me.”

“Great,” Henry said. He was feeling too old for nonsense. “Say hi to Paul and Nora for me—and Jefferson, when you find him again,” he said, before leaving. 

Grace nodded. “Pete says it was nice to finally meet you. He couldn't before because he was away at boarding school during my birthday. But he's _real_. He is!”


	4. Reading Between the Lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Henry feels all of the feels and thinks some of the thinky thoughts. 
> 
> **NOTE:** I can't remember if Henry still had his storybook between "A Tale of Two Sisters" and "White Out" but if Regina borrowed it from him then it magically went back to Henry in this fic, like a book-shaped stray cat.

Henry didn’t get into too much trouble for missing school. His aunt’s magic phylactery had activated a time-traveler’s portal that his mom fell through and she accidentally stopped Henry’s grandparents from meeting, so she got into a lot more trouble that afternoon than Henry could in a day. Henry’s ribs were still bruised, though.

He hadn’t told anybody but Archie, how the second curse had torn apart at least one other family, and how he suspected that Grace didn’t even have a family to take care of her. He wondered if Hareesh hated him for the same reason, only without the insanity to make him wishy-washy and harmless. Henry loved his mothers, but they all had enough problems of their own, so he couldn’t tell them. He knew Archie wouldn’t.

“Mother Superior set up an orphanage for the Lost Boys,” Archie told him, sitting across from a booth at Granny's. Everyone else was busy fawning over baby Neal. “They come from, oh, a number other realms, but there was a kind of magical baptism she did to make sure that something like a dark curse wouldn’t send them too far away. That they’d stay either with the fairies or with their adoptive families and—”

“The Lost Boys got adopted?”

“A few of them, during that year in the Enchanted Forest. Yes.” 

Henry had been happy to hear it, but something in the way Archie spoke told him that it hadn’t been happily ever after. He asked, “What went wrong?”

“It’s a long story.” 

Henry was a good guesser. Before Regina restored his memory, everybody else in Storybrooke only remembered Pan’s curse overtaking the town in wreaths of green smoke. The next moment, they were still in Storybrooke town. A year might have happened in between that they didn’t remember. A Lost Boy could have spent that year doubting the safety of the Blue Fairy’s cloisters, then taking the journey and opening his heart up to a new home and family. Instead, he blinks and finds himself alone in the middle of the street, and thinks that he was thrown away again, that the nuns had tricked him. He wouldn’t know his new family. His family wouldn’t know him. Lost Boys trained each other to be violent for _fun_ , so what would one do for survival?

“My point is,” Archie continued, “I can ask Mother Superior to look into what’s really going on with Grace. She’s in the best position to do something about it.”

“Would you please? That would be great.”

Archie nodded, smiling. “You’re a good kid, Henry. But you can’t blame yourself or feel responsible for something that…well, isn’t your responsibility!” 

“Grandma cast the dark curse to get back to us, to Emma and me. She did it to everyone, and most people in this town might not even want to be here.” 

“Do you resent Ms. Blanchard for that?”

“How could I? She broke her heart in half and was ready to kill grandpa! My dad—” Henry couldn’t finish the sentence. He hadn’t cried at the funeral because he hadn’t remembered him. He hadn’t cried at the grave because the memory of a scant few weeks with his father had been a year ago. He tried not to cry now because boys weren’t supposed to. He tried really hard. But he’d spent all day feeling like something was his fault, and trying to find it. Neal Cassidy didn’t die a hero, he died a lover and a father—those were more important, those left pains in empty spaces. _Heroism_ was becoming just a pretty word for _doom_. “I’ll—I’ll ask my moms if we could have sessions again?” Henry sniffled. “I think I finally have personal issues to work through.”

“‘Finally’?” Archie echoed, but his eyes were kind. They both laughed. 

*

Later Henry curled up in his bed, in the mezzanine of Mary Margaret’s loft, and he read through his story book again. He’d been able to read all the pages between the front cover and the back cover several times before, so, he realized, it couldn’t hold all the stories that could be told about everybody in town. August Boothe had to graft his own story in for Henry to read it, and it hadn’t been an unimportant piece to breaking the curse. Dr. Whale’s story hadn’t been in it at all, and Henry wondered that if he’d only known how the doctor had devastated young Regina’s hope of resurrecting Daniel…would he have understood his mother better instead of tried to win?

If he couldn’t find Hareesh’s story, Henry decided that he’d resort to challenging the other boy to a fair fistfight. It did matter how he could get Hareesh to quit hitting him, Henry hadn’t lied to Grace about that, and Henry was a boy of incorrigible curiosity and empathy: he wanted to understand Hareesh’s side of the story. Still, there had to be some line between harmless and masochistic. It would be a win just for Hareesh to leave him alone.

Besides, he had his own issues to take care of, especially when it came to his family. His mom had only just woken up to the fact that Storybrooke was their home, and he wanted her to keep that conviction, even if it meant that he’d see more of that creepy British guy. Meanwhile, his mother tended to self-destruct when she was lonely. Henry would be there to stop her. By complete coincidence, this noble undertaking would let Henry see less of his mom’s creepy British guy, and (hopefully, somehow) more of his mother’s also-British guy who was just much less creepy.

 _Who_ takes defensive combat stances whenever he encounters a prepubescent boy half his size? Who _does_ that? Captain Killian Jones, that’s who. Every time. Every single time. Never with prepubescent girls, which had to be some sort of discrimination. It got on Henry’s nerves. Roland might have been annoying sometimes, but Robin was at least used to being around kids because of him. Robin treated kids like people. Hook treated kids like snow globes filled with nitroglycerine. Why’d they have to lose Robin? 

Henry closed his eyes and saw fuzzy glowing rectangles that told him he’d been staring at his book for too long. He thought that he should put his book away and put out the light, but instead he fell asleep before that thought could finish.

Below, the grown-ups moved with quiet care and talked in murmurs. The baby gave little closed-lipped cries, as if he sensed the tension. Mary Margaret had lent Queen Elsa an old nightgown and her own bed to sleep in, before surrendering herself to exhaustion on the armchair. David had rolled out a sleeping bag for himself beside the crib, although he currently stood by the stove, waiting for the water to boil and rocking Neal in his arms to a more contented silence. 

David had also left Hook a sleeping bag, which Hook thanked him for and then completely ignored and left rolled-up rather than let his fingers leave the spaces between Emma’s. Emma slept on the sofa, Hook sat on the floor beside. The pirate wouldn’t be tempted away by hot coffee or warm milk or hot cocoa or cold beer or room-temperature rum, or a soft place to sleep, or sleep itself. 

“What if you have to go to the bathroom?” David whispered.

“I haven’t been drinking anything.”

“What about number two?”

“I don’t understand.”

David rolled his eyes. “Good to know chivalry isn’t dead.”

Or maybe Henry dreamed that conversation. Henry definitely dreamed of being trapped in a room that was on fire, and that Peter Pan’s sly voice behind him said, “You just need to believe, Henry.” So, Henry decided to believe that a room on fire should burn down. The paper walls melted away in the fires of logic, revealing a beach in Storybrooke. He recognized his favorite castle-shaped playground, but remembered when his mother said that it was a security risk and she built a playground in the woods instead. 

He ran into the woods, and hoped that his mother wouldn’t catch him at his castle against her rules, but the trees had more vines and the mist fell like rain instead of drifting about in wisps and billows.


	5. The Lion Sleeps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drunk!Regina meets human-shaped Bagheera and Baloo. 
> 
> The creatrix of the Drunk!Regina meme: [Michelle](http://thelast-thingido.tumblr.com/DRUNk!regina)

At first, Henry wanted to kick himself for forgetting the breakup recovery basket at Mary Margaret’s loft. When his mother let him into the manor and he saw that she’d already finished up all the apple cider she’d ever made, he figured that his memory lapse had been for the best.

Regina’s eyes were bloodshot and she spoke too loudly. “I’m _fiiiiine_ I don’t need anyman!” She slumped against Henry, who fortunately was tall enough at twelve not to fall over. “I just need you. You’re not like the rest of them, are you Harry? You’re not hairy like them Harry…” She thought this was so funny. Henry was worried. She never called him nicknames.

The doorbell rang. When Henry turned to answer it, Regina tackled him to the ground. “Don’t answer! We have all we need right here! You’re going to shtay my own shweet lil boy furrever. You won gripe into a heartwrecker. All stop time. I. Know. A. Spell.”

“Ow, mom, get off,” Henry grumbled.

“Nooo!” Regina cried. “I always hurt the ones I love!” She stumbled to the door, shouting, “I have to warn whoever’s out there to stay _sooo_ far away from m—”

Two swarthy, bald men waited outside of the door. They looked to be the same age, one was dressed in a fine tailored suit of black satin, the other in a hooded sweatshirt with bear ears on the hood. 

“Oh, hello there.” Regina’s voice dipped low and somehow playful at the same time. She leaned against the astonished man in black who, to his credit, didn’t fall over either. Regina ran the palm of her hand over his head. “You’re not very hairy either, so you could count.” She laughed again. “What’s your name?”

The man in the suit cleared his throat nervously, and started, in a crisp and delicate accent: “I’m Felix Bogart, madam Mayor. This is Arthur Needy—”

“Needy? Oh, I can relate,” Regina said, with a companionable gesture at the man in the hoodie. “Why don’t you both come in?”

“We are Hareesh’s parental guardians,” Mr. Bogart finished.

Regina nodded, hearing, then she slowed her nodding as she understood. “Oh,” she said flatly, taking an unsteady step back from Mr. Bogart. “Hareesh who the hell?” 

“He’s in your son’s class,” Mr. Bogart supplied, “We came to apologize on his behalf for the, ah, the altercation the other day.”

“Where’s his other half?” Regina asked, with authoritative firmness, but her question made no sense. She asked again, “Where’s my other half? I feel empty. Half empty. Like a pessimist. I could refill my glass. Where’s my glass.”

“Mom,” Henry said, “Maybe you should get back inside. You can deal with them tomorrow.”

“I’ll deal with you tomorrow!” Regina declared, with sinister relish. She turned to saunter back inside.

Mr. Bogart gulped. 

Henry looked to both of them. “I haven’t told her about Hareesh,” he said, “And I won’t, either. She has enough to deal with right now.”

“As I said, we apologize,” Mr. Bogart said.

“What’s stopping Hareesh from apologizing himself?” Henry wondered. 

“He’s our boy,” said the man in the hooded sweater, an article of clothing that made Henry’s mind immune to thinking of him as ‘Mr.’ anything. Arthur continued, “We’d die for him. After what he did to you? We guessed this was going to be the time to do it.”

“Either he’s not sorry at all, or he’s too afraid of my mom to apologize to my face,” Henry summarized. “Either way, this apology? Doesn’t count.” He felt mean to say it, but it also felt right. Henry himself hadn’t involved any grown-ups, except for Archie who knew not to interfere. Why had Hareesh broken their unspoken playground code?

Mr. Bogart bowed his head at the rejection. Arthur, though, looked defiant and said, “He’s missing. We thought your mom did something to him, and if it wasn’t too late we could save him.”

“I already told you,” Henry said, “She doesn’t know. To be honest, she’s so drunk right now that she’s going to start calling _me_ Hareesh.”

Arthur and Mr. Bogart looked at each other, exchanging unreadable expressions.

Mr. Bogart turned back to Henry and said, “Perhaps we could use your help.”

Henry shrugged. “Sure.”

“Would you put in a word with the sheriff for us? The department isn’t often staffed, we tried calling, but…”

Henry tried not to nod, because that would be a lie. “She is good at finding people,” he said.

Arthur read the awkward moment of silence. “You ain’t going to tell the sheriff, either? Do you think this is only between Hareesh and yourself?”

Henry argued, “More like I’m the one standing between Hareesh and spontaneous combustion! My mom’s got magic, too. She’s nicer than my mother, but she always knows when someone’s lying and she can’t control her magic. I don’t know what she’d do if she finds out what Hareesh did, okay? Look, wait here.” He went back inside, took the bottle away from Regina on his way to her study, wrote a note on a piece of letter paper, put it in an envelope, sealed it with saliva, super duper sealed it with a glob of wax and a patterning seal because he’d always wanted to try that, and was careful to keep the bottle locked in the study on his way out. His mother had started on the chocolates while he’d been in there: handcrafted truffle pralines in expensive-looking foil-rimmed and beribboned boxes with French words for all the different flavors. 

Henry went to the door, passed the envelope to Mr. Bogart and said, “Give that to Mr. Gold. He has a locator spell potion, and he might not be drunk. Good luck.” 

Unfortunately, they were halfway to the gate when Henry did a double-take and called out, “Hareesh doesn’t look like either of you!” All three of them were swarthy, but Hareesh had more copper, and where Hareesh had angular features Mr. Bogart’s were generally boxy whereas Arthur’s were generally round and full.

Regina laughed out loud and stumbled to the door. “Having two dads doesn’t work that way, Henry!”

“It might, partially,” Henry said to her. “I don’t know! I’m gathering what could be important information—”

But by then the two had gone—in a hurry, Henry suspected.

“Oh, mom!” Henry exclaimed, but he couldn’t be too angry with her. 

"Having two moms? Doesn't work like this either. It isn't working like this." Regina popped a piece of chocolate in her mouth and chewed, realizing something. Through a mouthful of chocolate, she blurted, “Arthur was a bear.” Then she went around looking for something to drink because the chocolate had nougat in it, and the sugar burned her throat. Henry poured her a glass of water.


End file.
